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Welcome to Asia Morning Briefing, a daily summary of the top news stories during U.S. business hours and insight into market movements and analysis. For a detailed overview of US markets, see Crypto Daybook Americas from CoinDesk.
The market is wondering if bitcoin is losing to gold. Darius Sit, co-founder and managing partner of QCP Capital, says the debate is often about price when liquidity realities matter more.
QCP, based in Singapore, is one of the largest trading desks in Asia, with an annual volume of more than $60 billion.
“If you compare Bitcoin to gold, it’s not a like-for-like comparison… you’re almost talking about a comparison between a mouse and an elephant,” Sit told CoinDesk. “There are two different sets of idiosyncratic market forces that affect market prices in the short term, but in the longer term I think: [they] remain quite similar.
Gold’s dominance reflects sovereign demand, well-established market structure and scale. Bitcoin’s lag is more due to the unwinding of positions than the collapse of the thesis. Gold’s market capitalization is so large that its daily fluctuations can exceed the total valuation of bitcoin, turning short-term divergences into a physical problem rather than a narrative verdict.
However, “longer term, the narrative seems the same,” Sit said.
A bigger inflection point, he says, is not the bullion rally, but the October 10 cryptocurrency deleveraging event (now called 10/10). This episode drew a hard line between Bitcoin and the rest of the digital asset complex, revealing how liquidity and credit attenuation diverge once leverage is broken.
“October 10 revealed that… there is a very clear line in terms of liquidity between crypto, altcoins and bitcoin,” Sit said. The takeaway is not that crypto lost its appeal, but that much of the market only discovered its true depth after forced unwinds wiped the book. What remained was a smaller landscape where prices move strongly in both directions.
One of the most important lessons from “10/10” was how crypto sites handle credit in the event of an outage.
Sit presents a stark contrast to traditional markets, where tiered structures of brokers and clearing houses absorb shocks before losses reach end users.
In comparison, native crypto exchanges often operate as single points of failure, relying on equity, insurance funds, and in extreme cases, socialized losses.
“The moment you trigger a socialized loss, your platform will lose trust,” Sit said, describing what he sees as the industry’s true institutional ceiling. Volatility is not a deterrent. The problem arises when traders cannot predict how liquidations and counterparty risk will be managed in a crisis.
A socialized loss occurs when an exchange’s insurance fund cannot cover bankrupt positions, forcing the platform to close traders’ profitable positions to cover the shortfall, thereby forcing winners to pay for others’ losses. This happened on many major stock exchanges during the October 10 stock market crash.
He added that participants perceived the rules as inconsistent, with some products or counterparties appearing isolated while others absorbed the shock.
This perception persists longer than the price drop itself. Markets can rebuild leverage and volume, but confidence in liquidation governance takes longer to return.
The result is a divided landscape in which bitcoin retains credibility due to greater liquidity and clearer use as collateral, while the broader altcoin complex trades at a structural discount that has less to do with macro focus and more to do with venue design and counterparty trust.
According to Sit, bitcoin still behaves as a hedge against long-term inflation and an increasingly readable form of collateral, while the broader altcoin universe is more directly subject to venue governance and order book depth than just macro narratives.
“When something has low liquidity, it can go down a lot. It can go up a lot,” Sit said.
Market movement
BTC: Bitcoin has been swinging violently but up slightly by about 5% over the past hour as extreme volatility followed a liquidation-driven fall toward $60,000, with the RSI near 17 signaling historically oversold conditions that often precede sharp relief bounces, even as the price hovers near the $58,000-$60,000 support zone.
ETFs: Ether traded around $1,895, rebounding about 7% in the past hour after a liquidation-driven selloff, with volatility increasing as deep oversold momentum conditions triggered a short-term relief rally despite double-digit losses over the past 24 hours.
Gold: Gold slipped about 3.7% to around $4,740 an ounce amid a broad pullback in risk assets and a wave of profit-taking, but analysts say the long-term uptrend remains supported by persistent central bank buying, concerns over debt and currency sentiment, and forecasts that still see potential for a price rise toward $7,000 later in 2026 despite short-term volatility.
Nikkei 225: The Nikkei 225 index slipped about 1%, extending a three-day losing streak as Wall Street’s tech rout spread to Asia, dragging South Korea’s Kospi down as much as 5%, putting pressure on stocks in Hong Kong and Australia and reinforcing a broader tone of risk aversion that also weighed on silver and other volatile assets.
Elsewhere in crypto
- US Treasury’s Bessent Slams Crypto ‘Nihilists’ Resisting Market Structure Bill (CoinDesk)
- Tom Lee’s Bitmine Now Worth $8 Billion Underwater As Ether Falls Below $2,000 (CoinDesk)
